Hi everyone, Will here, the Project Zomboid writer-guy. I won’t beat around the bush. The Indie Stone have just suffered a major set-back. The Newcastle flat where Lemmy and Binky live and work
was burgled last night, and so far the clearest things taken are two computers and Lemmy’s credit card.

Project Zomboid was regularly backed up from machine to machine, but rarely – sadly and infuriatingly – externally. We have lost an awful lot of work and (as you will have seen if you follow him on twitter: Theindiestone.com) members of our team were more than emotional.

This will clearly severely delay the next update, which was very near completion. I personally only just finished my work on it yesterday (one of the final things on the ‘to-do’ list) and had it ready for input
today.

Project Zomboid, however, will come back stronger. I just wanted to come onto Desura to let everyone know that this is a set-back and not a death-knell. If anything we will come back stronger, and with a better game.

During this time we will clearly be asking for the understanding and patience of our community. We are gutted, we are despondent and – most of all – we are sorry that this has thrown yet another bump into the
road towards PZ completion. We should have learned more about barricading the doors it seems...

It's always much easier to re-create things, you never have to start from scratch once you've done something once :) I bought Project Zomboid on Desura a few weeks ago, can't wait to see you guys get back on your feet it definitely held a lot of promise!

With that said, reddit/twitter was seemed like a pretty big PR disaster... It seemed like a lot of people were trolling as expected so, but I think that could have been handled a bit better there was a lot of back and forth on twitter until the account was deleted. I think that should have been handled a bit more delicately and not just a volley of insults.

Anyway, best of luck guys, maybe you will catch a break and recover the stolen property.

You already know the problems you ran into coding it the first time around, and you surely have a general idea of how what you made worked, so it should take no-time flat to put it back together! Well. You know. Half the time?

No matter how much I have always supported this game from behind the scenes, I hope you realise how more and more unbelievable these things are starting to sound, almost like excuses as to lacking updates and what not.

I'm trying to uphold moral for people wanting to buy the game on this end, never having heard of your entire website or group, but they're starting to lose hope in this ever seeing the light of day.

Another setback will sincerely mean nobody here will buy this game, and I don't feel like sending out raffle tickets for people to pick up a copy through Desura, I'm promoting the game all over the place but with such set backs nobody sees fit to actually buy it...

unlike cortex command, whom just ******* WONT update, but still have a growing fanbase.

Look at it from the bright side - I almost forgot about Project Zomboid but this theft reminded me that this awesome project exists and now I'm scraping my money to buy it, which I probably would have done otherwise :)

This is really sad news, one of the major things I had been looking forward to were save on quit, because it's so annoying to have to end a game just because there is no save function.

One can only wonder why the Project Zomboid team didn't have external backup procedures in place, external backup procedures should be first priority, especially when making something as big as Project Zomboid.

Back up your game to the "cloud" next time. Our company has 4 local computers backing our project up as well as two computers in other houses AND a backup on a website. I am very sorry for your loss, but you have to always think about that worst case scenarios before it's too late...

Whilst the news is tragic and a serious blow to the development of a promising game, I cant help but agree entirely with a few people throughout these comments. The thoughts are shared. Why is there so little damage control within a company / group that is working on a large scale project?

The lack of backups in a physical format or at another location, either online or also physical, is simply gobsmacking. Its a cruel world in the business scheme of things, and though not in a discouraging manner - precautions against this should be taken right from the start for any sort of scenario, including the problems with public relations / trolling, Paypal and piracy. If I recall correctly, there were also issues with funding regarding the home-rent of people working on the game, thus not having enough for development.

I'd assume establishing a stable life situation comes first before an expensive project.

I've paid for my copy of the game and thus cant demand anything / complain further since they already have my money, but heck, news like this is both bad luck and a slap of karma.

I'm sorry this happened to you, but unfortunately the fact that you are setback so far is a result of your own gross negligence for proper versioning control. There is simply no excuse for not having your code in an svn or git repository.

Regardless, good luck to you all, and I hope that you have learned your lesson!